Why 'The Colony' Star Kevin Zegers Doesn't Like to Use a Body Double

Kevin Zegers is one busy guy! The 'Mortal Instruments' star gave us a call to chat about his latest film 'The Colony' and explained why he prefers not to use a body double for action scenes.
Kevin Zegers is one busy guy!

Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was released in August, and his latest movie The Colony just came out on September 20. The film is about a group of people who live underground during the next ice age and their struggle to survive as they fight to preserve humanity against a group of savage cannibals.

Kevin gave us a call to talk about his latest film.

"I always like the guy who doesn't necessarily seem like he'd be the hero," Kevin said about his character Sam, "the sort of guy who doesn't seem like he has that gene in him to take control and do things outside of his expectations. He's just kind of getting by day by day." Another reason Kevin joined the cast? "I wanted to work with Laurence Fishburne and Bill Paxton," he told us. "Once I heard they were doing it, I was all over it."

And that includes being all over his action scenes. "I pretty much did all of it. The last fight scene I had with the farrow leader, I did that myself," Kevin said of the sequence that took four days to shoot. "I always have a problem if some other taller, more in shape version of you comes on kicking ass--it sort of looks weird to me. As much as I can, I try to do my own stuff. I just think it looks better."

As intense as his fighting scenes were, they still weren't the most difficult part of filming The Colony. "Shooting in the cold. That was definitely the most physically challenging," Kevin said. "The first few days we were filming outside, it kind of shocks your system. The first day we started filming I think it was -42. Your lips and mouth don't move the same way, so forming proper sentences without sounding like you're hammered was hard."

Filming on location definitely helped the cast get into character. "Ninety-five percent was real snow. The only scene where we didn't have real snow was the bridge sequence," Kevin told us. "A lot of the locations we were shooting in were isolated and there were no windows--you're kind of just walled in. The isolation and the stuff that goes on in the film, we were experiencing that."